Not long ago, Syrian dictator Bashar Assad was clinging
to power. Bolstered and rescued by Moscow, Assad is now focusing his wrath
on areas that were once rebel strongholds. In recent weeks, for instance, he
turned Aleppo into a slaughterhouse. Outgoing UN Secretary General Ban
Ki-moon calls Aleppo “a synonym for hell”—and
Syria “a gaping hole in the global conscience.”

If ever there was a metaphor for President Obama’s foreign
policy—with its countless words marshalled to rationalize Pilate-like inaction,
with its army of straw men deployed to defeat any hint of criticism, with its
insistence on “bearing
witness” while doing little or, at most, too little too late, with its
oxymoronic commitment to “leading from behind,” with its soothing reassurances
that America can “focus on nation-building here at home”—it is Syria.

The president is not to blame for Syria’s civil war or Assad’s
unspeakable brutality. But he is to blame for America’s nonresponse. With the
White House committed to “retrenchment” and “offshore balancing” and all the
other euphemisms for doing just enough to look like it was not doing nothing in
Syria and the Middle East, American foreign policy has become care-less. President Obama just didn’t seem
to care about Syria and its cascading consequences—or perhaps better said, cared
enough to say something but not enough to do anything.

It calls to mind a couple admonishments from scripture: “Do
not withhold good from those who deserve it when it is in your power to act,”
Proverbs tells us. Another translation says, “Never walk away from someone who
deserves help; your hand is God’s hand for that person.” Put another
way: If you are able to help, try to help. In a similar vein, James writes that
if we tell someone in need, “Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,” but we do
nothing about their needs, we’ve done no good at all. Put another way: Talk is
cheap.

To
be sure, governments are not expected do everything individuals are called to
do in scripture, and governments are expected to do certain things individuals
are not expected to do. But a great and good nation like the United States—arguably
the world’s only superpower, and surely the world’s only superpower with a
conscience—does not “bear witness.” It acts, or it bears responsibility.

At least give President-elect Trump credit for his candor. Many
months ago, his reactionto the slaughter in Syria was blunt and unfeeling: “Why do we care?” We cannot
predict what President-elect Trump will or won’t do in Syria. But given that
his threshold for U.S. military intervention is “a direct threat to our
interest,” it’s likely he will be guided by the “America First”
don’t-tread-on-me nationalism he brandished during his campaign.

President Obama, on
the other hand, said things like this: “We cannot stand idly
by when a tyrant tells his people that there will be no mercy…where innocent
men and women face brutality and death at the hands of their own government.”
(That was his description of Libya, a year before Assad turned Syria into a
synonym for hell.) And this: “When
dictators commit atrocities, they depend upon the world to look the other way
until those horrifying pictures fade from memory…sometimes resolutions and
statements of condemnation are simply not enough.” (That was after Assad’s
gassing of Ghouta.) And this: “Too
often, the world has failed to prevent the killing of innocents on a massive
scale. And we are haunted by the atrocities that we did not stop and the
lives we did not save…Awareness without action changes nothing.” (That was after
a year of killing in Syria.)

President Obama’s foreign policy would have been more
understandable if he had never pretended to care, if he hadn’t talked like
Vaclav Havel and then acted like Henry Kissinger. The president’s
defenders and hagiographers can dress it up as a “return to realism”—doubtless,
he himself will make such a case in his third memoir—but
the hard truth is that President Obama is indicted by his own words.

Of course, words were
always more important to President Obama than action. Consider his evaporating “red
line” after the chemical attacks on Ghouta, his demands that Russia withdraw
from Crimea and eastern Ukraine, his calls for China to respect international
waters, his declaration that America could “turn the page”
on the wars of 9/11.

In his book
“National Insecurity,” David Rothkopf includes a telling insight about
President Obama from Zbigniew Brzezinski, who observed early on that the
president “has this personal characteristic somewhere in his mind that
articulating something and defining it is the equivalent of action.” Nothing could
be further from the truth, especially when dealing with tyrants.

Reasonable people disagreed about the merits of intervening in Syria—with some
arguing that intervention was unnecessary because Syria posed no threat to U.S.
interests, others that because of its special role in the world the U.S.
couldn’t sit by while civilians were butchered, and still others that the
ouster of Assad would be a blow to Iran and thus in America’s interests. These
were valid points. But they were
secondary to the broader issue at stake. Whether democracy in Damascus or human
rights in Aleppo or vengeance for Ghouta were worth risking American blood is
open to debate. The importance of American credibility, American leadership,
American moral standing is not.

The president didn’t recognize this—or just didn’t care. As Leon Wieseltier observes in a scalding essay, President Obama “transformed our
country into nothing other than a bystander to the greatest atrocity of our
time...[D]uring the past eight years, the values of rescue, assistance,
protection, humanitarianism and democracy have been demoted in our foreign
policy and in many instances banished altogether. The ruins of the finest
traditions of American internationalism, of American leadership in a darkening
world, may be found in the ruins of Aleppo.”

ConsequencesYet for those who were listening as Senator Obama began his long campaign for
the presidency, this comes as no surprise. A detached, disengaged and care-less America is exactly what he
advertised.

For instance, he
made it clear that it is not America’s job to address humanitarian crises. As
the AP reported in
July 2007, “Presidential hopeful Barack Obama said Thursday the United States
cannot use its military to solve humanitarian problems and that preventing a
potential genocide in Iraq isn’t a good enough reason to keep U.S. forces
there.”

His defense of this
position sounded jarringly similar to that of isolationists, who always justify
non-intervention somewhere by pointing out that America cannot intervene
everywhere. “If that’s the criteria by which we are making decisions on the
deployment of U.S. forces,” the would-be Nobel Peace Prize recipient explained,
referring to genocide, “then by that argument you would have 300,000 troops in
the Congo right now…which we haven’t done.” He continued: “We would be
deploying unilaterally and occupying the Sudan, which we haven't
done.”

This is sophistry. Just because America doesn’t
intervene every place doesn’t mean American shouldn’t intervene in some places.
Indeed, presidents from both parties have used military force to address
humanitarian problems and/or affronts to human rights: Ireland was ravaged by
famine in the 1840s, and the U.S. sent warships loaded with food. Spain turned
Cuba into a concentration camp, and McKinley launched America’s first
humanitarian war. An earthquake and tsunami devastated Japan, and Coolidge deployed
the U.S. Pacific Fleet to aid in recovery. Stalin tried to starve Berlin into
submission, and Truman launched Operation Vittles.Vietnamese babies were abandoned, and Ford launched
Operation Babylift. Saddam
Hussein tried to strangle the Kurds, then warlords created a man-made famine in
Somalia; and the elder Bush dispatched U.S. troops to protect the
friendless Kurds and feed the starving Somalis. Slobodan Milosevic waged a war
of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, and Clinton used a NATO air armada to stop
him. Terrorists and tyrants turned large swaths of Southwest Asia into a
torture chamber, and the younger Bush used American might to build a bridge
back to civilization for Iraqis and Afghans.

Yes, many of these
interventions had strategic as well as humanitarian implications. Most
U.S. interventions do. Syria was one those instances where humanitarian ideals
and national interests overlapped. Early intervention to protect the Syrian
people—a humanitarian motivation—by targeting the Assad regime could have dealt
a blow to Syria’s patron in Iran, dissuaded Moscow from jumping in, blocked
jihadists from gaining a toehold, and prevented Assad from using or losing his
chemical weapons—all national-security interests. But that’s off the table now.
With Russian warplanes and advisors filling the vacuum created by President
Obama’s inaction, the sort of U.S. intervention that could have saved Syria is
no longer an option.

To be sure, the president did intervene in Libya on
humanitarian grounds, and he ordered the U.S. military to return to Iraq, in
part to rescue the Yazidis. But he was prodded into helping the Yazidis by Gen.
Martin Dempsey and shamed into acting in Libya by French President Nicolas
Sarkozy.

Even so, the president held up Libya as the model for U.S.
intervention. “In just one month,” he gushedin early 2011, “the United States has worked with our international partners to
mobilize a broad coalition, secure an international mandate to protect
civilians, stop an advancing army, prevent a massacre and establish a no-fly
zone with our allies and partners.”

But it wasn’t enough for President Obama to hail his
achievements in Libya (which turned out to be ephemeral). He needed to contrast
his record with the lesser men who sat in the Oval Office before him: “To lend
some perspective on how rapidly this military and diplomatic response came
together, when people were being brutalized in Bosnia in the 1990s, it took the
international community more than a year to intervene with air power to protect
civilians,” he gracelessly intoned. “It took us 31 days.”

To lend some perspective on how totally and terribly he failed
in Syria, consider this: On President Obama’s watch, more than 470,000 people have
been killed in Syria (including 50,000 children); 11 million Syrians have been
displaced and 13.5 million Syrians require humanitarian assistance; 70 percent
of Syria has been left without access to drinking water; a ghastly 11.5 percent
of Syria’s population has been killed or wounded; Iraq and Syria have been
dismembered by jihadists; Russia and Iran have expanded their reach and role throughout
the region; and the Pandora’s Box of chemical warfare has been reopened.